September 30, 2016

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Martha Rhodes, James Fujinami Moore, Ryan Murphy, and Sally Ball of Four Way Books

DD:Four Way Books began in 1991, as a venture between you and your graduate school friends: Beth Stahlecker, Jane Brox, Dzivinia Orlowsky, and Helen Fremont. How have these friendships influenced the evolution and tenor of the press?

MR: We really began in 1993, with first books in 1995. Brox, Orlowsky and Fremont ceased working for the press early on but have remained treasured friends. And I know that they are hugely proud of Four Way Books and of the time and energy that they contributed to the press. Beth Stahlecker, sadly, passed away in 1991 when the press was but a whisper between us. We published her first book posthumously and established a series in her name, The Stahlecker Series, for first and second books of poetry.

DD: In 2012, Jeremy Glazier wrote an excellent overview of the first twenty years of Four Way Books for the LA Review of Books. Gregory Pardlo’s Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize and Four Way Books continues to receive the critical and popular attention it deserves. Since 2012, what have been some of the other highlights in the story of Four Way Books?

MR: I would have to say Reginald Dwayne Betts’ book has been thrilling to work on, both in manuscript form and as a finished book. And I’ve loved working with Karen Brennan on little dark – she’s such a wonderfully eccentric writer, and such a brilliant craftswoman. (We have also just released her book of short fiction, Monsters). I struggle to highlight just these when I am so enthusiastic about the books we publish, all.

DD: Pardlo’s Digest is remarkable for so many reasons. One reason I admire it is for the way the poems dramatize cognition, and yet remain so tied to the heart. Pardlo gives us Deleuze and Guattari along with an aisle in the Fulton Street Foodtown. The work of a father with young children is held in equal esteem with the work of the philosopher and poet. All the poems in this collection feel so timely and timeless and essential. What do you find most compelling about this collection?

MR: I am glad that you appreciate Digest for the terrific collection that it is. I guess what I love about the poems – from the first time I heard them to reading them in manuscript then in book form—is the readability of the poems themselves. Whether lyric poem or poem driven more by narrative, whether he is digging close to his feet or throwing the shovel further out, these are poems that speak plainly about complicated sometimes tangled issues. They touch the heart and light up the brain.

DD: Present day Brooklyn is so palpable in all of its contradictions and nuance in Digest. The story of Four Way Books is inextricably linked with the spiritual topography of New York City. Can you tell us about this link? What does New York mean to you? What does New York mean for poetry?

JFM: I love this city, I truly do. I’m Angeleno by birth and temperament, so living in New York is at least partially anthropological, a study in compression and speed and experiments in stress. The city is unforgiving; it forces choice, and its luxuries are rarely free.

Recently I was at a talk with Ben Lerner on his new book The Hatred of Poetry and he mentioned that so much about what people hate about poets is tied up in that Whitman phrase “I loaf and invite my soul”. That whatever Whitman's intentions, there is an image in the broader pop culture of poets as indolent, self-indulgent sponges. Perhaps that is true of poets who do not live here; certainly I have met people who write with a casual ease, and I genuinely respect that as a way of working. But the poets that I know writing in New York now do not treat poetry lightly; they write under that same pressure and drive. Each word accounts for itself on the page. The poem pays its own rent.

MR: As for myself, I moved here from the Boston area. It was my intention to forego college and move to Washington Square Park where I knew I would become best friends with the poets there. “Over my dead body,” cried my father. I went to NYU, on the border of the park, and then transferred to the New School. I devoured poetry. I’d self-identified as a poet at 12 and I read, wrote, read and wrote around the clock. NYC, it seemed to me, was the only place to live. I went to readings every night, and all day and night on weekends. Over time, I’ve become more reclusive and the city has less importance to me as a writer. Having run 3 reading series for decades, along with other activities, I’m a bit burned out, in truth and place = NYC—plays less of a role in my poetry life. At least I think it does. I might be very wrong about that. And certainly, when I listened to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” every spring overlooking the Hudson, I think of Whitman and his beloved NY and look at the river, and then down my own street in Manhattan and think this is one hell of a back yard to pull from. Yet, New England is what really runs through my blood – its fields, sea, rivers, lakes, mountains. The hot, steamy summers, stilled town commons, white, green or black shuttered homes, lemonade mid-afternoon, quiet, easy. I don’t live there now, but do my best to be in New England whenever I can.

So, my relationship to NYC has changed as I’ve grown up in the poetry world – it seems less urgent a relationship than it used to. For poetry? I couldn’t venture to say.

DD: Cynthia Cruz’s newest collection, How the End Begins, startled and disarmed me. The poems are like tiny dioramas of wild longing and mortal desperation, like Emily Dickinson wielding Kafka’s ice-axe. One characteristic couplet from her poem, “Budapest,” comes to mind: “And who said I couldn’t/ die inside the warm balm of a lullaby.” Can you talk about this collection and how it continues the conversation begun in the other collections of Cruz published by Four Way Books: Wunderkammer (2014) and The Glimmering Room (2012)?

RM: Cruz's poems are shockingly hot in the way that only something very cold can be. She is a precise writer and what we see over the span of Cruz's recent collections with Four Way Books is an effort to continually renew and expand language—Cruz's articulation and exploration of the themes she is passionate about. The Glimmering Room uses dramatic personae, monologues, and characters. Wunderkammer, as the title implies, is a cabinet of wonders, filled with precious (often troubling) miniatures. How the End Begins stretches its address, embracing beginnings and endings at once, as evidenced in the title (also a sequence of poems), and everything in between (“The Birthday Ceremony”.) Her voice, her inventiveness, and her dexterity create poems as harrowing as they are beautiful.

DD: Four Way Books has cultivated relationships with many poets. You’ve published several notable collections by C. Dale Young and Kevin Prufer, for example. How does the editorial process change when you are working with an author over the course of several collections?

MR: C. Dale Young has published three poetry collections with us and one, his first, with Northwestern. We are now working on his debut fiction collection, The Affliction, which comprised of linked stories, you might even call it a novel in stories. C. Dale delivers nearly finished books, the editing that I do for him really addresses stylistic issues and I always defer to him, as any good editor does.

While I look at ordering decisions he’s made, and also look to see if there are poems yet to be written or poems that just aren’t needed in the books, I know that C. Dale has brought his manuscript through the wringer before submitting it to me. Same with his fiction collection, which I am editing now. While we’ve had a few discussions about the characters themselves, their motivations, conflicts, etc., the stories, I find, are beautifully crafted and realized. With CDY, I really challenge some stylistic decisions, which is an important job in itself.

Other authors turn in less realized manuscripts and the job then is to work with them over time, looking at multiple drafts, thinking about inclusion and exclusion of poems and stories, challenging the content and the ordering of material. A manuscript might go through revision, back and forth with me, over a year or more. It’s a thrilling experience for me, and I trust for them, to see fine collections become fully explored and turned on their sides to stand upright and even stronger for the work we do together.

SB: Kevin and I have worked together on four books now: we have a deep sense of each other as writers and readers, and probably anticipate each other's thoughts and reactions pretty well. A shift for me has been that I can't help but see poems and collections in relation to each other, so whereas with National Anthem and In a Beautiful Country we spent a lot of time talking about order and particular poetic strategies (the section breaks mid-sentence, the role of rhyme, tone in general--) now I am most interested in the ways his new ms., How He Loved Them, shows us a mind we haven't seen before, or a way of working and thinking and reckoning with the world that feels Pruferian and familiar and also new. I really trust Kevin and the ways he pushes himself. I think (I hope!) he feels something similar about the way I read the poems. They are utterly his and I love them, and then in addition, it feels like a collaborative and valuable endeavor to work together on how best to present them as a body to the world.

DD: Martha, you are a talented poet yourself. Your collection Mother Quiet (Zoo Press, 2004) has been a favorite of mine for several years. Anyone who has lost a parent will gather much solace and strength from this remarkable book. Your poems “My Brain was Enormous” and the title poem, “Mother, Quiet,” are particular favorites of mine. You explore the contours of grief and loss throughout this collection bluntly, but also in a fragmented fashion. Thank you for writing this book. What did you learn about loss, grief, yourself, your mother, and poetry throughout the writing of Mother Quiet?

MR: I am not sure that I learned about loss or grief from writing this book per se. What I learned, and continue to learn, is that presenting an emotional narrative, based in a life or imagined, is always challenging. I did not set out to write about my/a mother or loss of mind to disease, or, or, or. My books tend to become poetic sequences, and I kind of see all of them running into each other – At the Gate moves into Perfect Disappearance which moves into Mother Quiet which moves into the Beds. My 5th collection, The Thin Wall, forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press in 2017, is a departure from the others, a sequence of sorts too, but less autobiographical in nature (by that I mean that autobiographical and not, my other collections read as autobiography to a reader, I am aware of this, and may be in part or not, that’s for me to know!) Anyway, this work is more eccentric, I would say, and the narrative threads of the highly lyric poems are even more disrupted than in past books. I would say, though, that with the other books, there are strong tethers that run through, poem to poem. Back to your question about grief and loss – I don’t deal with either well in my life – I am a thin-skinned person when out of my emotional comfort zone. But action – of any kind – writing, reading, socializing, working – reminds me that what ails does not take up 100 per cent of my brain and heart – ever. There is more to the life than the problem the life faces at a given moment. So the act of writing, it seems to me, for me, makes me healthier at that moment. I am doing what I need to be doing. I am doing something that no one else can touch. I hope that makes sense to you!

DD: How has your work as an editor and book publisher influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your editorial and publishing work?

MR: My work as a teacher has influenced my work as a writer much more than my work as an editor / publisher. Four Way Books, though it is my life’s work, is my job. I love my job. I love the books we produce, the staff, the board of directors, and the projects we engage in on a daily basis. But it is my job. Teaching, a job too, reminds me each day of what we need to do as writers. It reminds me to practice what I preach. As an editor, this can happen too, of course! But when I work with students on poems, I am really working with myself as well. I’ve carefully chosen my career – as publisher / editor and as teacher to feed into my work as a writer. The complaint I have, of course, is the sheer amount of work I face and how it eats into my time as a writer. I work a twelve month year. No sabbaticals to look forward to. That’s hard and wearing.

DD: You’ve taught at many universities and colleges. How has the creative writing classroom changed for you over the years?

MR: In truth, it NEVER occurred to me that I would a) publish a book and b) teach. I did not go to grad school to do either. I went to grad school to learn more about writing, and to get feedback on my poems. The mission was simple and pure. I taught because I was asked to teach. I published because I was encouraged to do so. Without those prompts, I’d be writing poems but I doubt I’d be teaching or publishing books. It was one of my teachers who said, “You are writing your first book.” This statement was the first time it occurred to me that maybe I, too, could write a book. Another teacher said, after graduation, “Send it out.” And then ambition for the work really kicked in. I wanted to be seen, read. Now, it seems to me, many students see the prize before they’ve done the work. This isn’t a criticism on my part. It’s just an answer to your question. The climate has become much more career-oriented and that, I believe, informs the weather of the workshop.

DD: In 2010, you took over the directorship of Frost Place Conference on Poetry in Franconia, NH. Can you tell us about the work you do there?

MR: I am one of several conference directors. I am not on staff there but am contracted to run one of their conferences – the Conference on Poetry – that takes place during the summer. I’ve modeled it after the best conferences / residencies I know – Bread Loaf and the residency at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Faculty deliver classes during the week, run workshops, and give readings. There’s 15 hours of workshop during the week and 6 hours of classes. Time for discussion, writing, revising, and dancing. It’s a week in heavenly NH, overlooking the White Mountains.

DD: In a New York Times profile on Four Way Books, you mention Robert Frost’s North of Boston as one of your favorite books. Can you tell us about Frost’s influence on your writing life?

MR: I like the psychological complexity that Frost achieves in his best poems, through daily speech, music, form and structure. I am character driven in my own writing, so I enjoy his sense of the dramatic and how he achieves drama on the page. Just look at these four entry lines to Frost’s poem, “The Fear”:

A lantern light from deeper in the barn Shone on a man and woman in the door And threw their lurching shadows on a house Nearby, all dark in every glossy window

He is a master of setting, of positioning and illuminating, getting us to focus on people, situations, through location and re-location.

DD: What have been the most significant changes in the poetry publishing world since you began Four Way Books in 1991?

MR: Ha and Shhh… I knew next to nothing when Four Way Books began. I learned day-by-day. And still do.

Publishers open their doors to a wider range of work these days and are more inclusive as they curate their lists. It’s certainly not as much of a club as it was, though there are many camps. The publishers I respect are becoming familiar with the camps. The pool as a result is larger and more vibrant than ever before.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

MR: Readership. Buyers of books.

DD: What are some of the collections at Four Way Books that haven’t received as much attention as they should? Which poets have you published who deserve more recognition than they have received so far?

MR: I don’t think any of our books have gotten the attention they should, or writers the recognition they deserve. I think that’s true across the board for poetry and literary fiction. I truly believe that all of our writers – absolutely all – deserve more attention, wider readership – their books (not just a poem) deserve to be course adopted.

DD: Four Way Books prides itself on publishing an extremely aesthetically diverse catalogue. In so doing, you have sidestepped some of the counterproductive sectarian squabbles of the poetry world. Can you talk about this commitment to stylistic plurality?

MR: The commitment comes from our hope that everyone feels that they can submit to Four Way Books – established or emerging, MFA or no MFA, part of a literary community or not, narrative writer or intensely lyric. We aspire toward inclusiveness.

DD: What forthcoming titles are you most excited about?

MR: I am excited about all, and look forward to the debut collection SCALE by Nathan McClain whose poems I’ve followed for a long time. It will be out in 2017. I am delighted that we are following our poets Andrea Cohen, Cynthia Cruz, Sara London, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Kevin Prufer, Daniel Tobin with new work in the near future.

DD: Can you end the interview by giving us one of your favorite poems from a Four Way Books author?

MR: One of our poets, Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan, passed away this year, at a very young age, succumbing to a lung infection. She lived and worked in Houston (with a PhD from the University of Houston) and her first book, Shadow Mountain, won our Intro Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn. Her second book, Bear, Diamonds and Crane was also published by Four Way Books. This poem is from Shadow Mountain and is a section from the title sequence.

ONE QUESTION, SEVERAL ANSWERS by Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan

Where did your father live?House on Federal, City of Angels.

Where did your father live?Horse stall at a racetrack.

Where did your father live?Near the aqueduct, in a man-made desert.

Where did your father live?By a pear tree.With pears, ripe pears from that tree.

Where did your father live?Block 25.

Where did your father live?With thin strips of tarpaper.Pot under his straw mattress.

Where did your father live?Waiting in line to use the latrines.Waiting in line at the mess hall.Waiting for his parents.

Where did your father live?The Desert Chapel.

Where did your father live?With his brothers,transplants—Joshua trees.

Where did your father live?In his mother’s heart.

Where did your father live?Barrack 12, Unit 3.

Where did your father live?With 5 strand barbs.With windstorms and bitterbrush.With years of snowmelt, glacial erasure.

Martha Rhodes is a founding editor and the director of Four Way Books. She holds degrees from New School University (BA) and from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College (MFA). She is the author of four collections of poetry: The Beds (Autumn House, 2012), Mother Quiet (University of Nebraska Press / Zoo, 2004), Perfect Disappearance (2000 Green Rose Prize, New Issues Press), and At the Gate (Provincetown Arts, 1995). She has taught at Emerson College, New School University, and University of California, Irvine. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She also has taught at The Frost Place, Third Coast Writer’s Conference, Bucknell University’s June Seminar for Younger Writers, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is a frequent panelist at universities and conferences around the country. She is the current director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry. She lives in NYC.

James Fujinami Moore, editorial and publicity assistant at Four Way Books, received his MFA in poetry from Hunter College in 2016. Prior to that he majored in English and dance at Middlebury College. He is from Los Angeles.

Ryan Murphy, Associate Director at Four Way Books, is the author of The Redcoats and Down with the Ship. He has received grants and awards from the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Chelsea Magazine, The Fund For Poetry, and The New York State Foundation for the Arts.

Sally Ball, Associate Director at Four Way Books, is the author of two books of poems, Wreck Me (Barrow Street, 2013) and Annus Mirabilis (Barrow Street, 2005). In addition to her work with Four Way Books, she is an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Yale Review, and other journals, as well as online at The Awl, Narrative, and Slate.

Dante Di Stefano’s collection of poetry, Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight, is forthcoming from Brighthorse Books. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere. Most recently, he is the winner of the Red Hen Press Poetry Award and Crab Orchard Review’s Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. He lives in Endwell, New York.

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Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Martha Rhodes, James Fujinami Moore, Ryan Murphy, and Sally Ball of Four Way Books

DD:Four Way Books began in 1991, as a venture between you and your graduate school friends: Beth Stahlecker, Jane Brox, Dzivinia Orlowsky, and Helen Fremont. How have these friendships influenced the evolution and tenor of the press?

MR: We really began in 1993, with first books in 1995. Brox, Orlowsky and Fremont ceased working for the press early on but have remained treasured friends. And I know that they are hugely proud of Four Way Books and of the time and energy that they contributed to the press. Beth Stahlecker, sadly, passed away in 1991 when the press was but a whisper between us. We published her first book posthumously and established a series in her name, The Stahlecker Series, for first and second books of poetry.

DD: In 2012, Jeremy Glazier wrote an excellent overview of the first twenty years of Four Way Books for the LA Review of Books. Gregory Pardlo’s Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize and Four Way Books continues to receive the critical and popular attention it deserves. Since 2012, what have been some of the other highlights in the story of Four Way Books?

MR: I would have to say Reginald Dwayne Betts’ book has been thrilling to work on, both in manuscript form and as a finished book. And I’ve loved working with Karen Brennan on little dark – she’s such a wonderfully eccentric writer, and such a brilliant craftswoman. (We have also just released her book of short fiction, Monsters). I struggle to highlight just these when I am so enthusiastic about the books we publish, all.

DD: Pardlo’s Digest is remarkable for so many reasons. One reason I admire it is for the way the poems dramatize cognition, and yet remain so tied to the heart. Pardlo gives us Deleuze and Guattari along with an aisle in the Fulton Street Foodtown. The work of a father with young children is held in equal esteem with the work of the philosopher and poet. All the poems in this collection feel so timely and timeless and essential. What do you find most compelling about this collection?

MR: I am glad that you appreciate Digest for the terrific collection that it is. I guess what I love about the poems – from the first time I heard them to reading them in manuscript then in book form—is the readability of the poems themselves. Whether lyric poem or poem driven more by narrative, whether he is digging close to his feet or throwing the shovel further out, these are poems that speak plainly about complicated sometimes tangled issues. They touch the heart and light up the brain.

DD: Present day Brooklyn is so palpable in all of its contradictions and nuance in Digest. The story of Four Way Books is inextricably linked with the spiritual topography of New York City. Can you tell us about this link? What does New York mean to you? What does New York mean for poetry?

JFM: I love this city, I truly do. I’m Angeleno by birth and temperament, so living in New York is at least partially anthropological, a study in compression and speed and experiments in stress. The city is unforgiving; it forces choice, and its luxuries are rarely free.

Recently I was at a talk with Ben Lerner on his new book The Hatred of Poetry and he mentioned that so much about what people hate about poets is tied up in that Whitman phrase “I loaf and invite my soul”. That whatever Whitman's intentions, there is an image in the broader pop culture of poets as indolent, self-indulgent sponges. Perhaps that is true of poets who do not live here; certainly I have met people who write with a casual ease, and I genuinely respect that as a way of working. But the poets that I know writing in New York now do not treat poetry lightly; they write under that same pressure and drive. Each word accounts for itself on the page. The poem pays its own rent.

MR: As for myself, I moved here from the Boston area. It was my intention to forego college and move to Washington Square Park where I knew I would become best friends with the poets there. “Over my dead body,” cried my father. I went to NYU, on the border of the park, and then transferred to the New School. I devoured poetry. I’d self-identified as a poet at 12 and I read, wrote, read and wrote around the clock. NYC, it seemed to me, was the only place to live. I went to readings every night, and all day and night on weekends. Over time, I’ve become more reclusive and the city has less importance to me as a writer. Having run 3 reading series for decades, along with other activities, I’m a bit burned out, in truth and place = NYC—plays less of a role in my poetry life. At least I think it does. I might be very wrong about that. And certainly, when I listened to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” every spring overlooking the Hudson, I think of Whitman and his beloved NY and look at the river, and then down my own street in Manhattan and think this is one hell of a back yard to pull from. Yet, New England is what really runs through my blood – its fields, sea, rivers, lakes, mountains. The hot, steamy summers, stilled town commons, white, green or black shuttered homes, lemonade mid-afternoon, quiet, easy. I don’t live there now, but do my best to be in New England whenever I can.

So, my relationship to NYC has changed as I’ve grown up in the poetry world – it seems less urgent a relationship than it used to. For poetry? I couldn’t venture to say.

DD: Cynthia Cruz’s newest collection, How the End Begins, startled and disarmed me. The poems are like tiny dioramas of wild longing and mortal desperation, like Emily Dickinson wielding Kafka’s ice-axe. One characteristic couplet from her poem, “Budapest,” comes to mind: “And who said I couldn’t/ die inside the warm balm of a lullaby.” Can you talk about this collection and how it continues the conversation begun in the other collections of Cruz published by Four Way Books: Wunderkammer (2014) and The Glimmering Room (2012)?

RM: Cruz's poems are shockingly hot in the way that only something very cold can be. She is a precise writer and what we see over the span of Cruz's recent collections with Four Way Books is an effort to continually renew and expand language—Cruz's articulation and exploration of the themes she is passionate about. The Glimmering Room uses dramatic personae, monologues, and characters. Wunderkammer, as the title implies, is a cabinet of wonders, filled with precious (often troubling) miniatures. How the End Begins stretches its address, embracing beginnings and endings at once, as evidenced in the title (also a sequence of poems), and everything in between (“The Birthday Ceremony”.) Her voice, her inventiveness, and her dexterity create poems as harrowing as they are beautiful.

DD: Four Way Books has cultivated relationships with many poets. You’ve published several notable collections by C. Dale Young and Kevin Prufer, for example. How does the editorial process change when you are working with an author over the course of several collections?

MR: C. Dale Young has published three poetry collections with us and one, his first, with Northwestern. We are now working on his debut fiction collection, The Affliction, which comprised of linked stories, you might even call it a novel in stories. C. Dale delivers nearly finished books, the editing that I do for him really addresses stylistic issues and I always defer to him, as any good editor does.

While I look at ordering decisions he’s made, and also look to see if there are poems yet to be written or poems that just aren’t needed in the books, I know that C. Dale has brought his manuscript through the wringer before submitting it to me. Same with his fiction collection, which I am editing now. While we’ve had a few discussions about the characters themselves, their motivations, conflicts, etc., the stories, I find, are beautifully crafted and realized. With CDY, I really challenge some stylistic decisions, which is an important job in itself.

Other authors turn in less realized manuscripts and the job then is to work with them over time, looking at multiple drafts, thinking about inclusion and exclusion of poems and stories, challenging the content and the ordering of material. A manuscript might go through revision, back and forth with me, over a year or more. It’s a thrilling experience for me, and I trust for them, to see fine collections become fully explored and turned on their sides to stand upright and even stronger for the work we do together.

SB: Kevin and I have worked together on four books now: we have a deep sense of each other as writers and readers, and probably anticipate each other's thoughts and reactions pretty well. A shift for me has been that I can't help but see poems and collections in relation to each other, so whereas with National Anthem and In a Beautiful Country we spent a lot of time talking about order and particular poetic strategies (the section breaks mid-sentence, the role of rhyme, tone in general--) now I am most interested in the ways his new ms., How He Loved Them, shows us a mind we haven't seen before, or a way of working and thinking and reckoning with the world that feels Pruferian and familiar and also new. I really trust Kevin and the ways he pushes himself. I think (I hope!) he feels something similar about the way I read the poems. They are utterly his and I love them, and then in addition, it feels like a collaborative and valuable endeavor to work together on how best to present them as a body to the world.

DD: Martha, you are a talented poet yourself. Your collection Mother Quiet (Zoo Press, 2004) has been a favorite of mine for several years. Anyone who has lost a parent will gather much solace and strength from this remarkable book. Your poems “My Brain was Enormous” and the title poem, “Mother, Quiet,” are particular favorites of mine. You explore the contours of grief and loss throughout this collection bluntly, but also in a fragmented fashion. Thank you for writing this book. What did you learn about loss, grief, yourself, your mother, and poetry throughout the writing of Mother Quiet?

MR: I am not sure that I learned about loss or grief from writing this book per se. What I learned, and continue to learn, is that presenting an emotional narrative, based in a life or imagined, is always challenging. I did not set out to write about my/a mother or loss of mind to disease, or, or, or. My books tend to become poetic sequences, and I kind of see all of them running into each other – At the Gate moves into Perfect Disappearance which moves into Mother Quiet which moves into the Beds. My 5th collection, The Thin Wall, forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press in 2017, is a departure from the others, a sequence of sorts too, but less autobiographical in nature (by that I mean that autobiographical and not, my other collections read as autobiography to a reader, I am aware of this, and may be in part or not, that’s for me to know!) Anyway, this work is more eccentric, I would say, and the narrative threads of the highly lyric poems are even more disrupted than in past books. I would say, though, that with the other books, there are strong tethers that run through, poem to poem. Back to your question about grief and loss – I don’t deal with either well in my life – I am a thin-skinned person when out of my emotional comfort zone. But action – of any kind – writing, reading, socializing, working – reminds me that what ails does not take up 100 per cent of my brain and heart – ever. There is more to the life than the problem the life faces at a given moment. So the act of writing, it seems to me, for me, makes me healthier at that moment. I am doing what I need to be doing. I am doing something that no one else can touch. I hope that makes sense to you!

DD: How has your work as an editor and book publisher influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your editorial and publishing work?

MR: My work as a teacher has influenced my work as a writer much more than my work as an editor / publisher. Four Way Books, though it is my life’s work, is my job. I love my job. I love the books we produce, the staff, the board of directors, and the projects we engage in on a daily basis. But it is my job. Teaching, a job too, reminds me each day of what we need to do as writers. It reminds me to practice what I preach. As an editor, this can happen too, of course! But when I work with students on poems, I am really working with myself as well. I’ve carefully chosen my career – as publisher / editor and as teacher to feed into my work as a writer. The complaint I have, of course, is the sheer amount of work I face and how it eats into my time as a writer. I work a twelve month year. No sabbaticals to look forward to. That’s hard and wearing.

DD: You’ve taught at many universities and colleges. How has the creative writing classroom changed for you over the years?

MR: In truth, it NEVER occurred to me that I would a) publish a book and b) teach. I did not go to grad school to do either. I went to grad school to learn more about writing, and to get feedback on my poems. The mission was simple and pure. I taught because I was asked to teach. I published because I was encouraged to do so. Without those prompts, I’d be writing poems but I doubt I’d be teaching or publishing books. It was one of my teachers who said, “You are writing your first book.” This statement was the first time it occurred to me that maybe I, too, could write a book. Another teacher said, after graduation, “Send it out.” And then ambition for the work really kicked in. I wanted to be seen, read. Now, it seems to me, many students see the prize before they’ve done the work. This isn’t a criticism on my part. It’s just an answer to your question. The climate has become much more career-oriented and that, I believe, informs the weather of the workshop.

DD: In 2010, you took over the directorship of Frost Place Conference on Poetry in Franconia, NH. Can you tell us about the work you do there?

MR: I am one of several conference directors. I am not on staff there but am contracted to run one of their conferences – the Conference on Poetry – that takes place during the summer. I’ve modeled it after the best conferences / residencies I know – Bread Loaf and the residency at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Faculty deliver classes during the week, run workshops, and give readings. There’s 15 hours of workshop during the week and 6 hours of classes. Time for discussion, writing, revising, and dancing. It’s a week in heavenly NH, overlooking the White Mountains.

DD: In a New York Times profile on Four Way Books, you mention Robert Frost’s North of Boston as one of your favorite books. Can you tell us about Frost’s influence on your writing life?

MR: I like the psychological complexity that Frost achieves in his best poems, through daily speech, music, form and structure. I am character driven in my own writing, so I enjoy his sense of the dramatic and how he achieves drama on the page. Just look at these four entry lines to Frost’s poem, “The Fear”:

A lantern light from deeper in the barn Shone on a man and woman in the door And threw their lurching shadows on a house Nearby, all dark in every glossy window

He is a master of setting, of positioning and illuminating, getting us to focus on people, situations, through location and re-location.

DD: What have been the most significant changes in the poetry publishing world since you began Four Way Books in 1991?

MR: Ha and Shhh… I knew next to nothing when Four Way Books began. I learned day-by-day. And still do.

Publishers open their doors to a wider range of work these days and are more inclusive as they curate their lists. It’s certainly not as much of a club as it was, though there are many camps. The publishers I respect are becoming familiar with the camps. The pool as a result is larger and more vibrant than ever before.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

MR: Readership. Buyers of books.

DD: What are some of the collections at Four Way Books that haven’t received as much attention as they should? Which poets have you published who deserve more recognition than they have received so far?

MR: I don’t think any of our books have gotten the attention they should, or writers the recognition they deserve. I think that’s true across the board for poetry and literary fiction. I truly believe that all of our writers – absolutely all – deserve more attention, wider readership – their books (not just a poem) deserve to be course adopted.

DD: Four Way Books prides itself on publishing an extremely aesthetically diverse catalogue. In so doing, you have sidestepped some of the counterproductive sectarian squabbles of the poetry world. Can you talk about this commitment to stylistic plurality?

MR: The commitment comes from our hope that everyone feels that they can submit to Four Way Books – established or emerging, MFA or no MFA, part of a literary community or not, narrative writer or intensely lyric. We aspire toward inclusiveness.

DD: What forthcoming titles are you most excited about?

MR: I am excited about all, and look forward to the debut collection SCALE by Nathan McClain whose poems I’ve followed for a long time. It will be out in 2017. I am delighted that we are following our poets Andrea Cohen, Cynthia Cruz, Sara London, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Kevin Prufer, Daniel Tobin with new work in the near future.

DD: Can you end the interview by giving us one of your favorite poems from a Four Way Books author?

MR: One of our poets, Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan, passed away this year, at a very young age, succumbing to a lung infection. She lived and worked in Houston (with a PhD from the University of Houston) and her first book, Shadow Mountain, won our Intro Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn. Her second book, Bear, Diamonds and Crane was also published by Four Way Books. This poem is from Shadow Mountain and is a section from the title sequence.

ONE QUESTION, SEVERAL ANSWERS by Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan

Where did your father live?House on Federal, City of Angels.

Where did your father live?Horse stall at a racetrack.

Where did your father live?Near the aqueduct, in a man-made desert.

Where did your father live?By a pear tree.With pears, ripe pears from that tree.

Where did your father live?Block 25.

Where did your father live?With thin strips of tarpaper.Pot under his straw mattress.

Where did your father live?Waiting in line to use the latrines.Waiting in line at the mess hall.Waiting for his parents.

Where did your father live?The Desert Chapel.

Where did your father live?With his brothers,transplants—Joshua trees.

Where did your father live?In his mother’s heart.

Where did your father live?Barrack 12, Unit 3.

Where did your father live?With 5 strand barbs.With windstorms and bitterbrush.With years of snowmelt, glacial erasure.

Martha Rhodes is a founding editor and the director of Four Way Books. She holds degrees from New School University (BA) and from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College (MFA). She is the author of four collections of poetry: The Beds (Autumn House, 2012), Mother Quiet (University of Nebraska Press / Zoo, 2004), Perfect Disappearance (2000 Green Rose Prize, New Issues Press), and At the Gate (Provincetown Arts, 1995). She has taught at Emerson College, New School University, and University of California, Irvine. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She also has taught at The Frost Place, Third Coast Writer’s Conference, Bucknell University’s June Seminar for Younger Writers, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is a frequent panelist at universities and conferences around the country. She is the current director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry. She lives in NYC.

James Fujinami Moore, editorial and publicity assistant at Four Way Books, received his MFA in poetry from Hunter College in 2016. Prior to that he majored in English and dance at Middlebury College. He is from Los Angeles.

Ryan Murphy, Associate Director at Four Way Books, is the author of The Redcoats and Down with the Ship. He has received grants and awards from the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Chelsea Magazine, The Fund For Poetry, and The New York State Foundation for the Arts.

Sally Ball, Associate Director at Four Way Books, is the author of two books of poems, Wreck Me (Barrow Street, 2013) and Annus Mirabilis (Barrow Street, 2005). In addition to her work with Four Way Books, she is an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Yale Review, and other journals, as well as online at The Awl, Narrative, and Slate.

Dante Di Stefano’s collection of poetry, Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight, is forthcoming from Brighthorse Books. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere. Most recently, he is the winner of the Red Hen Press Poetry Award and Crab Orchard Review’s Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. He lives in Endwell, New York.